Midnight Louie 14 - Cat in a Midnight Choir (42 page)

So who was the third man?

Temple had an idea, and she was looking for him tonight.

The migraine music stopped.

Temple glanced at the stage.

Temporarily vacant.

In the glassed-in sound booth, she saw a man standing and talking to the kid who ran the sound board. Not the man she was looking for.

Who do you overlook at a strip club?

The man who is looking at you, but from behind a mask.

She was looking for the man in the mask.

The music started up again, so suddenly it nearly snapped her head back. The strips of tissue she had stuffed into her ears barely muted it.

She figured if the guy was a regular, and he probably was, he’d come back to Baby Doll’s. To allay suspicion if nothing else. Or just to relive his big moment.

Temple had read the true crime books, some of them anyway. She knew the profiles, yucky as they were.

She knew something else as she scanned the constantly moving crowd of customers: that head of dark, slightly wavy thick hair.

Darn! Rafi Nadir was here too.
Of all the gin joints…

She spun back to the face the bar, hunkered down. When she’d told him this was her next thong gig, he was a suspect worth watching. Who’da thought that Lindy would later tip her off that a new hot suspect would be here tonight?

Unlike Nadir, this was somone too nondescript to describe, although she’d glimpsed him once, more than once when she reviewed all her forays into the clubs.

He was like a mailman, someone made invisible by his function.

Tonight she wanted to spot him, and then really see him.

And she didn’t need Raf Nadir playing Big Man to her Little Girl to get in the way.

An off-duty stripper (were they ever off duty?) who was cruising the house paused to twine her arms around his neck.

He must like that, being greeted like a Big Spender. The male ego could be a slippery slope to being taken, and then expected to take it back in spades.

Oh, the music! It was worse than forty alley cats caterwauling. Temple liked high-octane rock, the best stuff, but this was jacked up so that the bass became a punishment.

She glanced in annoyance at the gangly kid in the glass booth, his head bobbing on his scrawny neck (which she’d like to wring), staring sightlessly at the stage where a girl slithered out of her second skin (courtesy of Tess the Thong Girl, as they’d started calling her already). Temple was struck by how fast and easy it was to establish yourself in a subculture like this. Well, easy for her as long as she wasn’t masquerading as Suzy Stripper.

It would be that easy for the killer too.

And then she spotted him. Suspect Numero Uno.

That nervous little middle-aged man in the yellow polyester shirt and the polyester-linen sport coat. Hair receding about as much as his belly advanced. A bit officious as he lined the offstage girls up, telling them what to do and clearly liking it.

And that mask he carried everywhere, his ticket to entry into this scene, the reason nobody ever really saw him clearly, because every time they looked right at him, really looked at him, they were thinking of themselves and never saw him, couldn’t see him, not through the monocle of glass that made them small in his eyes and him eternally nonexistent in theirs.

Temple nodded to the bartender.

“Another
S
and
S
?” he asked.

If she had either scotch or soda in her glass, she couldn’t testify to it in court. “Yeah. And…that guy.”

“Lady, there are sixty guys in here.”

“Him. The photographer. Do you know who he is? I mean, who is he shooting the photos for?”

“His bedroom wall.” The guy left to run some tapwater and sheltie pee over the ice cubes in Temple’s glass.

He plunked the glass beside the ten-dollar bill she’d glued to the water spots on the bar.

“Guys can just come in here and do that?”

“They make copies, give ’em to all the girls. What a racket.”

“Well…” Temple said, jiggling her thong ring.

“Yeah, but you’re selling a product. You don’t get off on it unless you’re a dyke. These losers, they just gotta be around the girls but they don’t want to pay for it. They gotta think they’re special.”

And a guy who thought he was special might ask for special treatment, and if he was refused…

“How long has he been doing this?”

“Since I been here?”

“And —?”

“Longer than you’ve been coming around. Why you want to know?”

“I’m new. Just curious.”

“Just curious don’t pay in this game. Forget it. He’s nobody.”

Nobody just might get tired of that condition.

Temple checked out Nadir through a concealing strand of blond Dynel wig.

The same stripper was still with him. His arm circled her waist. They were talking, smiling, flirting.

Revolting! She’d be glad to wash this scene right out of her hair, her fake hair. She glanced at the officious photographer again.

Well, it was an intriguing idea, but there wasn’t much she could dowith it except pass it along to Molina, who would sneer at her amateur theories.

Still, she had come up with an alternative to Max, at least, and they could check on this guy’s movements, his history. Who knows what would show up?

She kissed the ice cubes a less-than-fond farewell and slid off the stool. Her rear was numb.

“Sold out?” the bartender asked.

She nodded, feeling guilty about the two-hundred-something of stripper-earned money in the tiny wallet-purse she’d learned to carry in the clubs on a shoulder strap she wore across her chest like a bandolier.

They worked hard for the money. Temple hated to take any of it under false pretenses, for vulgar accessories to a lifestyle that still made her cringe.

She could hardly wait to walk out of here — if only Rafi Nadir wouldn’t notice her! No, he and that stripper were still hanging on each other.

She had to push with all her might to open the big front door.

The night air wasn’t really cooler, but it felt cleaner, rinsed of all that smoke that made her ears and nose and throat clog up like ice in a pipestem glass.

She walked across the lot to where she had hidden the Miata between two huge custom vans. That was the problem with a new high-profile car. It was a liability for sleazy undercover work.

She missed the snappy click of her high heels on the asphalt, a percussion that had always lifted her spirits since she’d been allowed her first pair at fourteen, and that made her feel taller. But sneakers were smarter to wear and her ears still rang from the relentless music inside, like an infection she couldn’t shake.

The parking lot had a wooden fence stretched between brick posts to present a more seemly view to the street. Facade was all in Las Vegas.

Temple realized she had mixed emotions: she hoped she’d found a suspect who would take the heat off Max. She was so sick of the strip club scene.

She glanced at the fence, lit by the security light.

A cat sat on it. A silhouette in the night. Big cat.

Its mouth opened wide to showcase white shark’s teeth in a mouth raw and red against its backlit form.

Maybe it was a black cat.

Temple spotted the Miata’s sassy and sleek rear end, looking black, not red, in the vans’ shadow, and moved toward it, her door key between her first and second knuckle.

And then she realized what was wrong.

The cat had howled.

And she hadn’t heard it.

She was temporarily deaf from the music inside and…she hadn’t taken out the wads of tissue in her ears.

She was temporarily deaf.

A body slammed into her from behind.

Slammed her up against the van.

“You don’t want to leave.” The voice was right at her deaf ear, penetrated the soundlessness like a scraping file.

“I’m not a stripper,” she said.
Not me. I don’t fit the profile.

If only she could reach up and rip out the tissues, but his body had crushed her against the lukewarm metal, arms pinned at her sides, the ring of costumes cutting into her ribs and hip.

“You’re pretty,” it said. A hand snagged in the rough fibers of her wig. She could feel the bobby pins that held it on slipping. “Come home with me.”

He was pushing her along the van. She felt the side door give behind her, slide open, even heard the sharp crack as it began to move.

His van. She had become a crime of opportunity.

Once inside…

Temple squirmed, resisted, tried to scrabble along the moving door so something solid remained behind her, so she wasn’t pushed, sucked into that bottomless imprisoning dark within.

The struggle must have knocked some tissue out of her ears. She heard like one cured: an unholy yowling, a whining like the horrible shrieking sound played behind the shower murder scene in
Psycho
.

Oh, Lord, she was
in
the shower murder scene in
Psycho
!

The guy’s elbows and hands and knees were jamming into her, hurting her, but she kept scrambling. She didn’t know anything about him: how tall, how old, how heavy. He was just an impinging part of the dark.

If she went down, she would never know….

She felt herself slipping, sinking into the off-key shrieking sound, her wrist desperately twisting to turn the big metal ring on her wrist.

He had gotten tangled in the jungle of elastic straps, an arm, Temple thought.

In that instant, her fingers found the small cannister danging from a keychain amid the garish fabrics. Max’s so unromantic gift.

She twisted it, twisted her hand half off its joint, and pushed on plastic.

A mist hissed up between them like an invisible serpent’s head, as searing and blinding as a sandstorm in her eyes, her nose, her throat.

Force fell away, but Temple tumbled writhing and gagging to the asphalt. After the hard struggle along the metal van side, it felt as cushioning as a warm gingerbread cookie.

Tears blinded her. Her ears, though, were finally clear of tissue. The horrible shrieking, screaming, howling sound never stopped.

Molina: Face-off

Before Molina could answer, he swung her away from the wall.

She was surprised by his strength, quite amazing, almost equal to an angel-dust addict’s. The move lifted her off her feet for a second.

She had never experienced in adult life that pit-of-the-stomach carnival-ride thrill she felt now, not in martial arts class and not even in sex, not since she had grown into a tall woman and made herself strong and independent, and ultimately celibate. He only had thirty pounds on her, but he was all muscle and bone, as flexible as a rattlesnake tail.

Now he was pressing her so tightly between the van and himself that she could hardly breathe. She had never allowed herself to speculate about any man’s sexuality, not for years, not since she’d become a career woman in a man’s world. He was right about one thing: she was all business, all working mother, all bureaucrat and civic servant. And hunter.

He released her, drawing his left hand down her arm to her hand. His right hand tilted her face to the side. Then his mouth touched her neck over the carotid artery. Every move was music, slow and controlled and perfectly pitched. Not a kiss, a slow-burning brand.

She was back in a crowded high school hallway, a gangly, thick teenager watching the petite bow-head girls as they ransacked their lockers between classes. Giggling and brushing back the careful curls from their necks to show off small lurid bruises. Hickeys. The tattoos of a quarter century ago. Badges of sexual initiation. She knew now that these marks demonstrated the boys’ passion and possession more than the girls’. Good Hispanic girls were too repressed to feel passion, but they were good at pretending to it. And they welcomed visible signs of possession, of their own dangerous desirability. Hickeys were the one pimple an adolescent girl could be proud of.

She had never had one.

A departing headlight raked across their figures like a spotlight. She used the distraction to push him away. “Vampire,” she accused.

“Vlad the Impaler,” he answered.

How could he find sex so amusing, she wondered, especially this explosive kind that defied all previous behavior, all roles, all reason? Maybe he found her amusing.

“You just want to screw me.” The accusation, the situation demanded an ugly word for it.

“Right. I just want to screw you.” He said the words emphatically, separately, with an undertone of surprise.

Somehow the surprise made the vulgarism sexy, not dirty, as he looked at her mouth, then her eyes. “But I won’t. Not until you just want to screw me as much.” He had perfectly imitated her tone but his words were an invitation, and hers hadn’t been.

She caught her breath. Words were just another weapon to her, but they didn’t work for her like this, not in emotional clinches. Only on the street, where they were ugly and effective.

“Don’t try your bedroom games on me,” she said contemptuously again, softly. She meant the contempt for the games, not the bedroom, but she had to wonder if one hadn’t rubbed off on the other for her long ago.